Glen Bell

Glen Bell: The Man Who Industrialised the Taco

The decisive piece of equipment in the history of American fast food was commissioned from a man who made chicken coops. Around 1951, running a hot dog stand in San Bernardino, Glen Bell asked him to build a custom frying contraption that could hold tortillas in a folded U-shape and drop them into oil in batches. The crispy taco shell that resulted is now eaten, in one form or another, roughly 36.8 million times a week in the United States alone.

San Bernardino

Glen William Bell Jr. was born on 3 September 1923 in Lynwood, California, to Glen William Bell Sr. and Ruth Elizabeth Bell — a mother of Swedish and English descent from Minnesota, a father of German and English descent from Iowa. He graduated from San Bernardino High School in 1941, into a country about to enter the war, and served as a cook in the United States Marine Corps. That is the whole of his formal training in food: the Marine Corps mess.

In 1948 he opened Bell's Drive-In, a stand in San Bernardino selling hot dogs and hamburgers. He was in the right town at exactly the right moment. San Bernardino in the late 1940s was where the McDonald brothers were reinventing the hamburger stand, and Bell's own venture was launched in the wake of their success, built around the same insight: that Southern California ran on cars, and that the customer should be served through a window without leaving one.

Across the Street

What made Bell different from the dozens of other operators copying McDonald's was that he looked in a different direction for the product. He learned to make tacos from the owners of the Mitla Café, the Mexican-American restaurant in San Bernardino, and from the chef Gloria Hoyle, who taught him the recipes for her family's Dorado-style tacos. This is the founding fact of Taco Bell and it should not be softened: the dish was not his. It was given to him, or at least shown to him, by the people whose cuisine it was.

What he added was engineering. A hand-made taco is assembled and fried to order, which is fine for a restaurant and impossible for a drive-through queue. Bell's contribution was to break the process into steps that could be pre-staged — shells fried in advance in the chicken-coop man's rig, sauces standardised, assembly reduced to seconds — so that a taco could be handed through a window at the speed of a hamburger. He perfected the shell and he perfected the sauces, and then he perfected the flow.

Serial Founder

His path to Taco Bell was not a straight line, and it is littered with businesses he built and left. In 1952 he sold his original stand and opened a second one, still on hot dogs and hamburgers. From 1954 he ran Taco-Tia stands, selling tacos at nineteen cents. He then partnered with John Galardi to open four El Tacos in the Long Beach area; Galardi went on to found Der Wienerschnitzel, and Bell himself dabbled in the hot dog business again around 1961 before returning to Mexican food for good.

The pattern is of a man who kept building concepts, testing them, cashing out, and starting again — four or five distinct chains before the one that stuck. Two of the largest fast-food brands in America, Taco Bell and Der Wienerschnitzel, trace back to the same handful of Southern California stands and the same two men.

Downey, 1962

Bell opened the first Taco Bell in Downey, California, in 1962, having separated from his previous partners. It expanded quickly across Los Angeles. In 1964 he began franchising, which is the decision that converted a regional chain into a national one, and by 1978 he had 868 restaurants. That year he sold the company to PepsiCo for $125 million in stock.

His subsequent venture was, characteristically, nothing to do with food: in the late 1970s he opened a tourist railroad at Tuolumne, California, with steam locomotives and recreational facilities. Traffic declined and it closed in the early 1980s. He was allowed one failure that did not matter.

Why Glen Is Called a Genius

The faculty here is not intellectual and it is not culinary. Bell invented no recipe — he was taught the taco by the Mitla Café and Gloria Hoyle — and he was not the first to see the potential of the drive-through, which he took from the McDonald brothers operating in the same town. The word, applied to him, has to mean something narrower: an exceptional instinct for the industrialisation of a food, and for the specific mechanical problem of making a hand-assembled dish reproducible at speed by unskilled staff in thousands of locations. Solving that requires understanding a food not as a recipe but as a process, and it is the same species of thinking that produced the moving assembly line. Greg Creed, later Taco Bell's president, called him "a visionary and innovator in the restaurant industry."

The counter-case is substantial and unavoidable. Bell took a cuisine that was not his own, from a community that had been cooking it in San Bernardino before he arrived, standardised it for an Anglo mass market, and built a personal fortune on it while the Mitla Café stayed a single restaurant. Whatever one concludes about the ethics of that, it is a fact about who captured the value. Nor was his commercial judgement infallible: he founded and abandoned several chains, watched a partner build Der Wienerschnitzel out of a business they shared, and lost money on a tourist railway. The honest assessment is of a shrewd, restless operator with one genuinely original technical insight — the batch-fried shell — and the persistence to keep starting over until a concept caught.

Legacy

Bell died of Parkinson's disease on 16 January 2010 at his home in Rancho Santa Fe, California, aged eighty-six, survived by his wife Martha, two sons, a daughter, four grandchildren and three sisters. The company he sold in 1978 now operates more than 5,600 restaurants in the United States under Yum! Brands and serves around 36.8 million people a week. Its central product remains a folded, pre-fried corn shell — the one thing in the whole enterprise that Glen Bell can genuinely be said to have invented, and the reason the rest of it was possible.

Achievements

• Educated at San Bernardino High School